This book offers a distinctive and accessible approach to the earliest encounters of the Germanic tribes of Northern Europe with classical antiquity and with early Christianity. It brings together linguistic evidence from across Europe and dating from before Caesar to about 900 AD, to shed light on important aspects of Germanic culture. It shows how semantics and loanword studies, often avoided by non-specialists, can provide important clues for historians and archaeologists of the period. Likewise, it demonstrates that philologists and linguists ignore historical evidence at their peril.
Author(s): Dennis Howard Green
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 1998
Language: English
Pages: 454
City: Cambridge
Preface ix
List of abbreviations xi
Map xiv
General introduction 1
PART I: THE GERMANIC WORLD
Introduction to Part I 11
1. Religion 13
2. Law 30
3. Kinship 49
4. Warfare 67
5. People and army 84
6. Lordship 102
7. Kingship 121
PART II: CONTACT WITH THE NON-GERMANIC WORLD
Introduction to Part II 143
8. Contact with the Celts 145
9. The migration of the Goths 164
10. Germanic loanwords in Latin 182
11. Latin loanwords in Germanic 201
12. Trade and warfare with the Romans 219
13. Names of days of the week 236
14. The vocabulary of writing 254
PART III: CONTACT WITH CHRISTIANITY
Introduction to Part III 273
15. Problems of Christianisation 275
16. The influence of provincial Roman Christianity 291
17. The influence of Gothic 308
18. The influence of the Merovingian Franks 325
19. The influence of the Anglo-Saxons 341
20. Contrasts in Christian vocabulary 357
21. The vocabulary of ethics and fate 374
Bibliography 392
Index of words 419
